December
Over these past months, nine, to be exact, I’ve come to think that pleasure and pain always have something to do with things either entering or exiting your body.
Nine months ago I didn’t know that a series of events related to those entrances and exits would converge that November, the same month I turned thirty. My father was diagnosed with colon cancer, Adriana committed suicide by throwing herself from a hotel window, and I was lying in a Spanish National Health Service hospital bed, recovering from major surgery. I returned home, devastated by the news, and physically very weak. I can scarcely remember the days following my operation, two weeks during a particularly cold winter, during which I’d needed J’s help for almost everything. To cut my meat, to brush my teeth and to clean my incisions.
I’d had some excess mammary glands removed from beneath my armpits and I could barely move my arms. I had two enormous scars from which catheters emerged, draining dark blood. I’d decided to have the glands removed because, aside from being unattractive and annoying, the doctors have assured me that, one day in the remote future when I decided to have children, they would fill with milk and cause me terrible problems. And so I decided that I should amputate what I saw as a deformity, even though my mother, with her magical worldview, insisted on reminding me that in other times, women with supernumerary breasts were burned as witches: for her, my two extra breasts could have held supernatural powers.
The surgery went off without complications but the recovery was turning out to be very difficult. On top of that, the antibiotics they had prescribed to prevent infection seemed to be burning a hole in my stomach.
On J’s birthday, just a few weeks later, I was still feeling so uncomfortable that I decided to stay home. I don’t tend to miss my spouse’s birthdays, so this was unusual. Now, in addition to intense stomach pain, I was nauseated. The next day, when it was time for me to go back to the office, I couldn’t get out of bed. I was too tired. I threw up the entire morning. At noon, J called to see how I was doing, but also to give me some news.
“Don’t panic. Okay? The magazine’s closing. It’s done.”
My father’s prognosis unknown.
My friend throwing herself into the void.
My mammary glands hacked off.
And now I had lost my job.
J came through the door with a pregnancy test in his hand. We’d been toying with the idea for a few months, in a perpetual coitus interruptus. The true vow, before the “I’ll love and respect you forever” part, is: “I promise not to come inside you.” It’s the first promise that gets broken.
There’s a secret rebellion, maybe a stupid one, but a rebellion nonetheless, against the adult world, or against anything, in never having a condom in the bedside table. I’ve always thought the hottest thing is that familiar scene when the lovers are just about to climax and something interrupts them. Cut short, what could have been a good orgasm becomes the best orgasm. No complete orgasm can exceed a perfectly incomplete one. Pulling out is like retiring at the peak of your career, like writing a masterful volume of short stories and then disappearing, like killing yourself at the age of thirty.
We fell silent for a few seconds looking at the indicator; it’s like looking at the gun you’re going to use to kill yourself. A pregnancy test is always an intimidating presence, especially if you’re freshly unemployed.
I had to pee in a vial, sprinkle a few drops on that white thingy while J read the instructions and finally figured out that two stripes means yes and one stripe means no. According to the box, a home-pregnancy test is 99 percent accurate if the result is positive, while, if it’s negative, there’s a greater margin of error and the test should be repeated in a few days. I don’t know how many times I’d taken that test in my life, the result almost always negative.
Women play all the time with the great power that has been conferred upon us: it’s fun to think about reproducing. Or not reproducing. Or walking around in a sweet little dress with a round belly underneath that will turn into a baby to cuddle and spoil. When you’re fifteen, the idea is fascinating, it attracts you like a piece of chocolate cake. When you’re thirty, the possibility attracts you like an abyss.
On the leaflet it also said that pregnancy tests measure the presence in urine of a hormone called Human Chorionic Gonadotropin. This hormone, let’s call it by its first name, Gona, appears in the blood approximately six days after conception, when the fertilized egg implants in the uterus. In the five minutes it took the gadget to decide what would become of my life, I scrolled in slow motion though every time I’d made love during the past month, trying to identify the fatal day. Finally, the two red bars quickly appeared, like the words “The End” in a movie.
“That’s the last time we ever work together at the same place,” I said to J.
Because now we could actually say that an entire family was about to be out on its ass, and facing the coldest Christmas in years, according to the weatherman. Although the weatherman is usually wrong.
* * *
Two gametes form a zygote. I like the way the fertilization formula sounds. It’s pure math. The most powerful feelings upon discovering that you’re pregnant have to do with the unreality of the math. They’ve told you it’s there, that it will multiply in size, that now it’s the shape of a peanut, and then a cherry, and so on, but you don’t see it, you don’t feel it. I could have opted to pay two hundred euros for one of those ultramodern sonogram machines that show you what’s inside, but for now, I would limit myself to consulting direct testimonies. To one woman, a four-week-old embryo looked like a shrimp, to another, it was a pea, to another, a little fish, and to another, a spot in the distance. Why should maternity draw us immediately into lyrical digressions and take us to the edge of inanity? Could the mere possibility of having a baby with the face of a frightened monkey in our arms be enough to trigger that unbridled tenderness? I decided to write my own zoological turn of phrase: “At four weeks, a child is like the ghost of a seahorse.”
The truth is you still can’t see anything. Just the premature gestational sac, less than ten centimeters in diameter, the bag inside which the fetus will grow. What an awful word “fetus” is. It’s so ugly. An embryo looks like something that could only be aquatic. It doesn’t look human. It has a tail. It’s four millimeters long and its eyes are like the pair of black dots that you sometimes find in a raw egg before putting in in the skillet.
In my old encyclopedia of the human body, I read that in an embryo you can already make out the spinal column, the lungs and the rest of the organs, all on a minuscule scale. However, a four-week old baby is not a human being, it’s hundreds of species all at once. Up until recent decades, it was thought that the human baby passed through every stage of evolution inside the mother’s womb, that it had the gills of a fish and the tail of a monkey. It seemed plausible. Then it was proven that those weren’t really gills and that wasn’t really a tail, but, in seeing the images of a fetus’s evolution, one might well conclude that pregnancy is the trailer for the movie of life. Would you like to see the whole film?
Books don’t prepare you for what’s coming. Manuals for pregnant women must have been written by mothers completely drugged by love for their children, without the slightest pinch of critical distance. They all say: you’ll feel slight nausea in the morning, your breasts will become full and tender, you’ll feel tired and the frequent need to urinate. Ah, and of course: “don’t smoke, don’t drink coffee or Coca-Cola, don’t take drugs, avoid x-rays.” How the hell am I supposed to bear all this stress without even a can of Coca-Cola? How is it that no one has yet created a designer drug for pregnant women? Prenatal ecstasy, LSD for expectant mothers, something like that.
To start with, it’s not just nausea; the fundamental malaise that seizes you when you wake up in the morning is like waking up with a hangover and a guilty conscience all at the same time, like waking up after a loved one’s funeral or seeing dawn break on the day after losing the love of your life. The nausea would attack me in the most inopportune places and times. I started to think that it revealed a certain psychology in my relationship with things. For example, I always got nauseated when I had to do something that I didn’t want to do, like go out to buy bread very early in the morning in the middle of winter. It also appeared when I was with a certain, very beloved friend. Every time I saw her I would have to run to the bathroom.
Don’t even get me started on my breasts; they hurt at the slightest touch. They weren’t the only sensitive things. It was all of me. I never imagined that I could cry watching one of those horrendous talk shows hosted by some snake in the grass who interviews children searching for their mothers and neighbors who hate each other; but cry I did, oceans of tears, especially at stories like: “Her husband cheated on her with the ninety-nine-cent-store clerk… Let’s bring out the huuuuusband!” I, a person with advanced degrees, raised in a home where we listened to Silvio Rodríguez and Quilapayún, would find myself curled in a fetal position under a blanket, the remote control my only umbilical cord to the world. And someone had pressed the slow-motion button.
I spent long hours watching trash TV, sleeping and dreaming that I was giving birth to a monkey.
* * *
My sister and I had a game. We would announce: “Let’s play mother and daughter.” We were always mothers and we were always mothers to daughters. The maternal world was a world for women alone. It was very easy to be a mother: it consisted of naming our dolls, covering them with a blanket and combing their hair. And when I was the scriptwriter, some sort of tragedy always had to occur, a devastating earthquake, for example, that would infuse a little drama into the maternal role. Our dolls would cry and we would protect them from the hurricane-force winds and take them somewhere safe. It was lovely to be a mother when we were in danger. It made you a better mother.
* * *
Barcelona seemed like a good place for two naïve journalists with literary aspirations who believed in the possibilities of their resumes, but not for two aspiring journalists with a child. J and I had gone to work for the magazine, Lateral, first for nothing and then for very little. But we were happy to be able to dedicate ourselves to our vocations after working various jobs invented to exploit undocumented immigrants. We hadn’t arrived on a raft, but our status as foreign students relegated us to the lowest rung on the employment ladder.
No one here cares what you might have done before in some place in the Southern Hemisphere. Your self-published little books are worthless. Ditto that pretentious-sounding Master’s degree you’ve come here to complete. It won’t do you any good to say you were published in the most important media outlets in your country and that you won a prize.
That’s why you’ll end up working for free like the oldest intern known to man. Your thirties aren’t exactly the most auspicious runway for launching your career.
On top of that, they speak Catalan in this city and the Catalans want us to speak to them in their language, even though they are perfectly bilingual, so they tend to offer the good jobs to those who speak it. The Catalans are super nice about a lot of things, but when it comes to the topic of language, they’re total drags.
And even though you know nothing about it, you’ll try to earn money in the prosperous restaurant world as a waitress serving seafood paella. You’ll work for speculators during the real estate bubble, selling off apartments that had belonged to evicted little old ladies. You’ll deliver junk mail door to door, risking being bitten by a ferocious dog, or you’ll be a voice on the telephone selling whatever.
The good thing about Barcelona is they celebrate a cute holiday during which people exchange books and roses. It’s sort of like Valentine’s Day but instead of going to the movies, couples go shopping at bookstores. This gives you the sense — not always correct — that you’re surrounded by sensitive, cultured people. Here, the newsstands on La Rambla, bulging with newspapers and magazines, look like supermarket shelves. Here, people read on the metro, though later you realize they’re reading Coelho and Dan Brown. Here, the local soccer team always wins. And, like it or not, that winning spirit is contagious.
Maybe all of this is why it was actually enjoyable to allow myself to be exploited by a literary publication run by people as fun and learned as Lateral’s director, Mihály Dés, a Hungarian-born Jewish intellectual who settled in Spain many years back; and as its Editor-in-Chief, Robert Juan-Cantavella, the youngest, most handsome, most rock-star boss one could ever dream of. Mihály became an entrepreneur in order to pursue the dream of running an independent journal and he’d done the impossible in keeping it afloat for eleven years. But debt had sunk it in the end. At least, just before it went under completely, taking advantage of the massive regularization of immigrants the government was undertaking, J and I had managed to get Lateral to extend us an employment contract, our very first in Spain. In this way, we had changed our status from students to residents with legal employment. But we had to find other jobs right away or we would lose our precarious legal status.
What would we do with a child outside of Peru? Would we dress him in clothing from a dumpster, make him live with five drunken students, get him a Barça membership card? Certainly we would tell him that a person’s dignity isn’t defined by one’s job. We’d teach him not to take taxis because they’re very expensive and to ride his bike in the rain. On Sundays we’d take him to IKEA. Or better yet, we’d train him to do a weekly search through the trash for almost-new household appliances. We’d buy him clothes at Humana, that chain of second-hand clothing stores run by people who care about the environment. We’d take him to do our weekly grocery shopping at Día, the run-down supermarket where the carts of derelicts, squatters and neglected retirees clash in the aisles. And if all that weren’t convincing enough, we’d tell him that he’ll always be able to drink coffee and eat croissants while leafing through El País on a crowded, sun-dappled terrace at midday, while others are busy busting their humps. And that he should read Henry Miller. My child: Europe is the best place for a Latin American to starve to death and drink good wine. Welcome.
When I went down to take out the trash, I picked up a free newspaper and, by chance, found myself looking at a typical headline about immigration: “Fifteen percent of people born in Spain are the children of immigrants.” That’s how we are, we jump into bed so enthusiastically that we end up balancing the demographic scales in a country with the lowest birth rate in the world. It’s only thanks to us that there are more births in Spain than there are deaths. But a bit lower I read another headline in small print: “One third of abortions in Spain are sought by immigrants.” In the article, a doctor declared that he treated many South American women who arrived bleeding to death “because they took aspirin and parsley.” Does that work?
* * *
My first visit to the obstetrician, instead of making the news feel official, made everything seem even more unreal. Public insurance doesn’t include such perks as ultrasounds every time you’re in the mood to give your embryo a little tickle tickle. Here, unlike in Lima, there’s no Women’s Diagnostic Center next to every no-tell motel. And so I was forced to wait until February for my first ultrasound, the first-trimester ultrasound. I’d have to live with it. The only clear news about this child had been delivered to me in the form of two red lines. I was going to spend Christmas and ring in the New Year without seeing so I could believe.
The purpose of that first visit was to establish contact with the midwife, the person monitoring the pregnant woman from month to month. There are only three scheduled visits with the gynecologist before the birth. The midwife is not a doctor but she knows everything about pregnant women and babies. They are the hospital versions of the self-taught neighbor ladies from other eras who would come to attend to you at home and cut through the umbilical cord with their teeth. Eulalia appeared with her short, curly gray hair, her dirty white coat, and those inexplicable red high-heeled shoes that she always wore without stockings. She invited me in and, adjusting her thick glasses, prepared to take down my medical history. She gave me a little purple notebook that said: “Carnet de l’embarassada.”
“Do you have a family history of cardiovascular disease, cancer, congenital defects, multiple pregnancies …?”
My grandmother had been diabetic, my father had a section of his intestine removed, several relatives had died of heart attacks, my great aunt died of breast cancer. With her quasi-doctor’s handwriting, Eulalia made note of some of the saddest parts of my biography, in the same style she probably used to make a grocery list. When we came to my own history, I mentioned my recently excised supernumerary glands and a cyst I’d had removed from my right ovary a few years back. Also three abortions. I felt a bit worse for wear.
“What’s your LMP?”
“My… LMP?”
“Yes, your Last Menstrual Period.”
I told her I didn’t know when my LMP had been. I’ve always hated that moment when, just before inserting an apparatus to sound the depths of my insides (an apparatus that looks dangerously similar to an industrial orange juicer), the gynecologist asks about my last period. Because at the instant they ask me about it, I draw a complete blank. Over time, I decided not to admit that I couldn’t remember, and from then on, I always said “the eleventh,” which is my lucky number. She took out a cardboard wheel and began to fiddle with it in order to calculate what week of gestation I was in and the probable due date. Your little cabbage, she said, will be born in August. The word “cabbage” activated my own memories of the popular dolls, “Cabbage Patch Kids,” that I’d had when I was a little girl. The song from the commercial was very cruel: “Cabbage Patch Kids were born from a flower/Who will take care of them?/They have no mommy.” And so a six-year-old girl got emotionally blackmailed into adopting a baby with a plastic head and a cloth body that their mom and dad would pay for.
“Lie down here, please.”
I lay down on the exam table. Eulalia — who, I was later surprised to find out, was a gospel singer in addition to being a midwife — raised my T-shirt and began to prod my belly, which looked the same as always.
“Now we’ll listen to its heart.”
I would finally be able to confirm that something alive, something that wasn’t my own soul, was inhabiting me. She put an ultrasound monitor on my belly. At first, the silence was absolute. Eulalia moved the wand from side to side and I started to think that I was maybe some sort of crazy lady with one of those imaginary pregnancies. Until, at last, the exam room filled with an outrageous “boom boom.”
“That’s its heartbeat.”
“…”
“And this one is yours.”
The difference in rhythm was shocking. A fetal heart beats at a rate of 120 to 160 beats per minute, while an adult heart beats only 76 times per minute. The heart of a fetus is, proportionally, more than nine times bigger than a full-grown human’s. From the eighteenth day onward, it beats and beats without stopping until the moment of our death. The sound of that muscle is almost the first human manifestation. Once upon a time, we too, were only a heartbeat. Only much later do we become bigger than our hearts.
When I left the office, I read in My Baby and Me, the magazine Eulalia had just subscribed me to, that this Christmas, among all the iPods and MP3 players, there was also a gadget that uses Doppler technology to listen to the fetal heartbeat inside a mother’s belly. “Without having to go to the doctor,” said the advertisement, and “using a cable hookup,” you can record the sounds or connect a telephone to share them with others: for only 69 euros, “we can also feel its little kicks, when it has the hiccups, and even record the mother’s heartbeat to calm the baby after it’s born.”
Soon we’ll be able to chat with our fetus in real time.
When I got home, I wrote in my blog: “Its heart beats like a sampler from a mentally unstable DJ; its heart is pure electronica while mine is an old progressive rock song.”
* * *
There comes a time in life when a woman has to recognize that she’s no longer able to write the sexual autobiography of a Lolita. After all the memoirs of fiery Italian girls and adolescent Chinese S&M aficionados that I’d come across, I’d established that there’s an age limit for scandal. Or maybe not. In any case, I didn’t feel like making a fool of myself for such little money and with no guarantee that I’d become a best-selling author, or at least a Catherine Millet, the French art critic who recounted how she got banged by a whole pack of guys in the middle of a forest, among other intimacies. There are times when one should take life more seriously than literature. Not many, but they do exist.
Shortly after I arrived in Barcelona, I was hired by Primera Línea, a magazine that, in the 80s, had been one of the artifacts of cultural disinhibition and among those that most quickly acceded to the changing mores of the times. In sum: it was a pioneer when it came to publishing tits on its covers. My boss, Guillermo Hernaiz, is the only authentic hedonist I’ve ever known. Guillermo organizes fetish and DJ parties at the most popular clubs, and he always has an over-the-top assignment for me. I’m his favorite gonzo journalist, his kamikaze, as he likes to call me. Under the pseudonym, Ada Franela, I’ve written the most sensationalized pieces in every issue. For one of them, I allowed myself to be whipped by a bloodthirsty dominatrix in front of a packed auditorium, before becoming her apprentice. For stories like that one, I got interviewed on the radio and on television. A couple of pieces for PL paid almost the same as Lateral paid me for a whole month of work. Writing about sex had become profitable. As it happens, just as I found out that I was expecting a baby, I was putting the finishing touches on a book.
It had started as a piece of investigative journalism, transformed instead into a gonzo chronicle, and ended finally as a testimonial with the trappings of a questionable erotic novel. Immediately after reading the piece I wrote for the magazine Etiqueta Negra about liberal-minded people who derive sexual pleasure from swapping partners, the editor of Primera Línea offered me work. But the next gift bestowed by the swingers tribe would be that a publishing house would commission me to write a tell-all book about that subculture. In the last few months, I had dedicated myself, along with J, to visiting liberal clubs and parties, participating in orgies and even promoting them among our acquaintances. In addition to this rigorous fieldwork, I had gotten my hands on a copious bibliography—from Boccaccio to Bataille, through to Melissa P.—that was piling up on my desk.
Was it right that this tiny cell would one day learn to read? When he asks me where babies come from, would I encourage him to look on the bookshelf for his mother’s erotic confessions? How does one raise a human being to be able to cope with his childhood friends’ jeers about his mother’s technical descriptions of group sex? In which alternative high school should I enroll him?
Alongside the pile of books about sexual perversions, a separate tower composed of maternity handbooks, month-by-month pregnancy guides, and psychology texts for first-time mothers was taking shape.
My last piece for Primera Línea was an article called “Do You Want to Have Sex With Me?” It was about fictitiously proposing sex to all sorts of men, and recording their reactions. I stationed myself at midnight in the doorway to the bathroom at a disco called Fellini to offer myself to every man who passed by. A large number of them responded that they never had sex on the first date. When I got home, I wrote that you had to woo the men of today with flowers and chocolates. I was one month pregnant.
* * *
Virginia Woolf didn’t have children. Neither did Eva Perón. How was I ever going to become a household name now that I had turned into a regurgitant being? The poetry of Sylvia Plath, one of my favorite poets, had improved greatly after she had her children, but soon after, she had killed herself by turning on the gas and sticking her head in the oven. I wasn’t interested in paying such a high price to be a good writer. To begin with, pregnancy turns you into a bag of gases. There’s not a shred of poetry in that, I can assure you.
Every day I told J that if we had any doubts at all we still had time to end this thing. I asked myself if it would be equally valid to write my own Letter to a Child Never Born, Oriana Fallacci’s epistolary novel, if I had to add: “because of my own fault.” How could I help but read that slim volume during those hours of unhealthy hesitation? I discovered that Oriana, the now hyper-conservative Italian writer known for her anti-Islamic fascism and her declared homophobia, was also capable of crafting a lovely metaphor when she discovered she was pregnant. She said: “You seemed like a mysterious flower, a transparent orchid.” Everyone, a murderer, a rapist of children, the president of a superpower, we all discover the poet inside us upon imagining “that drop of life that escaped from nothingness.” Anyway, like Fallaci but in a different way, I could explain sweetly and pedagogically to my fetus that abortion is an inalienable right of emancipated women. I would write: “Dear embryo, you are only a mammalian blueprint, ignorant of the power that others have over your existence, you have no face, and even less a brain with which to sense my suspicious movements on the outside. Why would I pluck you from nothingness only to return you to nothingness?”
When I was twelve years old I saw my mother reading The Second Sex by the French feminist, Simone de Beauvoir. The title had that three-letter word in it, so it must have contained something good. Also, I had never seen my mother keep a book with her for so long, the way other people carry the Bible under their arms. Yes, that book was my mother’s Bible. It was worn and underlined, filled with small secret annotations. One day I finally stole it from her. I read it and it made such an impression on me that I came up with the idea of bringing it to school. I remember that, before the start of class, I read out loud to my girlfriends entire paragraphs about the necessity of resisting our biological destiny. For Beauvoir, women passively suffered that destiny, doing household chores, reconciling themselves to maternity. For her, bearing children and breastfeeding did not imply any sort of life plan, they were natural and imposed functions. But in the afternoons, my boyfriend would pick me up from school and we’d seek out some secluded place where I could surrender to my dark destiny as a woman.
Why the obsession with motherhood? As I write this, thousands of women are trying to procreate in every single place on the planet. With sperm banks, surrogate mothers, donated eggs. I know because I, myself, while I was writing a piece about egg donation, went to the Dexeus Clinic in Barcelona and donated ten of my eggs to an anonymous woman who couldn’t get pregnant. And at this very moment, many other women are allowing the possibility to go down the drain.
I know that reproductive technologies will not stop until we can all become mothers. I’m writing about my pregnancy at the same moment in which people in white coats are conducting research into the possibility of female auto-procreation, male pregnancy, the gestation of human beings in animals and in women who are clinically dead.
I read this in a popular-science article: a child can be born with the genetic material of a third person whose identity he will never know. Twins can be born separated by several years. A woman can give birth to a baby she didn’t conceive or that she conceived with the sperm of a dead man. A child can have up to five progenitors (ovular, gestational, social mother; genetic, social father). A grandmother can gestate a child conceived by her daughter and son-in-law. And even more spine chilling is the fact that there are companies that sell reproductive services and women’s body parts, like eggs and uteruses. Other companies specialize in the predetermination of fetal sex, like in India, where, I’ve read, 29 of every 30 female fetuses are aborted.
The same thing always happens to me around scientific advances: I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry. Stories like the one I read in Elisabeth Roudinesco’s book, The Family in Disorder, make me feel like I should get myself baptized: “In June of 2001, the story of Jeanine Salomone, a native of Draguignan, was the talk of the town. At the age of sixty-two and after twenty unsuccessful attempts, she gave birth to a boy, Benoit-David, conceived with purchased eggs and the semen of her own brother, Robert, who was blind and paraplegic as a result of a suicide attempt involving a gun. She had introduced him as her husband and the Californian doctor who pulled off the heroic feat didn’t ask any questions about the couple’s strange appearance. What’s more, since the procedure produced an extra embryo, he implanted it in the uterus of a paid surrogate mother, who gave birth to Marie Cécile, born three weeks after Benoit-David. Adopted by Jeanine, the two children were, simultaneously, siblings, half siblings and cousins, and, under no circumstances could they become the legal son and daughter of an incestuous couple. So, on the civil registry, they were simply recorded as the children of a celibate mother and an unknown father.”
This was happening all around us. And I was simply pregnant. Not so much because I had wanted to be. To use a cliché: with the way the world is, one can’t afford the luxury of wanting something too much. These days, a woman gets pregnant because the idea doesn’t disgust her. Though it does make her a bit queasy.
* * * * *
“December” is the first chapter of Nine Moons, Gabriela Wiener’s book on the nine months of her pregnancy, published on May 26, 2020 by Restless Books. To acquire a copy from Bookshop.org, click here.
The excerpt appears here with the permission of Restless Books, copyright © 2009 Gabriela Wiener, © 2020 translation copyright Jessica Powell.
For Ron Slate’s review of Sexographies (2018) published On The Seawall, click here.